Bites from other Blogs

Foccacia dough is very similar to pizza dough: stretchy, thin and flavorful. Foccacia can be used for all kinds of toppings, too, even if a finish of herbs and olive oil is the most common. A Yankee in a Southern Kitchen used more pizza-like toppings to create Cornmeal Foccacio with Heirloom Tomatoes and Vidalia Onions. It’s a bit heartier than plainer foccacia and makes a great, light meal. The addition of cornmeal in the crust adds a lot of texture and a little extra crunch.

The Ground Cherry Cupcake Pies at Vegan Yum Yum will appeal to a wide range of people. People who like miniature desserts/cupcakes. People who love pie. People who love pie but don’t like to roll out pie crust. The crust for these adorable little pies is pressed into a paper-lined muffin tin before being filled and baked. The technique is easy and makes for great single-serving pies. The type of fruit in the pie can be varied to just about any kind of fruit or berry.

If you’re more interested in full-sized pies, Milk Eggs Chocolate baked a Vanilla Peach Lattice Pie. The filling is primarily fresh peaches, sugar and vanilla bean, so the flavors are very bright and clean. The lattice, surprisingly, isn’t that difficult to make. And since almost no time goes into preparing the filling (aside from peeling the peaches), it’s easy to justify a few extra minutes of work on the crust.

Toasting nuts is a great way to bring out their flavor so that baked goods using them offer deeper, richer tastes. In some cases the nuts will toast up to some extent during baking, but to get the most out of them it is a good idea to toast before incorporating the nuts into your batter or dough. Culinary Concoctions by Peabody used this technique in a batch of Toasted Coconut Shortbread. The cookies are simple in terms of ingredients and rich in flavor.

When I was little, if I was lucky, there might be a box of donuts sitting out on the kitchen table alongside the morning newspaper. There was one chocolate covered donut that I particularly liked, even though the plain cake donuts were always my very favorite. Instead of waiting for donuts to be delivered, Priscilla Bakes fried up some homemade Chocolate Glazed Chocolate Donuts. The yeasted donuts are not difficult to put together – although it will take some more time from start-to-finish than simply running out to the nearest donut shop – and the chocolaty finished product is well worth the wait.

If someone asked me to make carrot cake oatmeal, I would probably chop up some pieces of leftover carrot cake and toss them into a bowl of oatmeal with some extra maple syrup, stir them in and call it breakfast. Eat Me, Delicious took a much more refined approach and made Carrot Cake Oatmeal with actual grated carrot, as well as pecans and coconut. What a great (and healthier than my idea) twist on breakfast!